Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories

  It would be inconvenient to explain. He had wanted the kindliness of soft evening light, both for himself and the old friends he was to see again.

  He began thinking of his son, now a boy of twelve. “Well,” he said to himself, “his character has not begun to form yet.” There was, as yet, in the son, an unconsciousness of other people, a rather casual selfishness, an unawareness of others, an unhealthy sharpness about getting the best of others. It was a thing that should be corrected in him and at once. John Holden had got himself into a small panic. “I must write him a letter at once. Such a habit gets fixed in a boy and then in the man, and it cannot later be shaken off. There are such a lot of people living in the world! Every man and woman has his own point of view. To be civilized, really, is to be aware of the others, their hopes, their gladnesses, their illusions about life.”

  John Holden was now walking along a residence street of a small Ohio town, composing in fancy a letter to his son in the boys’ camp in Vermont. He was a man who wrote to his son every day. “I think a man should,” he told himself. “He should remember that now the boy has no mother.”

  He had come to an outlying railroad station. It was neat with grass and flowers growing in a round bed in the very center of a lawn. Some man, the station agent and telegraph operator perhaps, passed him and went inside the station. John followed him in. On the wall of the waiting-room there was a framed copy of the time-table, and he stood studying it. A train went to Caxton at five. Another train came from Caxton and passed through the town he was now in at seven forty-three, the seven-nineteen out of Caxton. The man in the small business section of the station opened a sliding-panel and looked at him. The two men just stared at each other without speaking, and then the panel was slid shut again.

  John looked at his watch. Two twenty-eight. At about six he could drive over to Caxton and dine at the hotel there. After he had dined, it would be evening and people would be coming into the main street. The seven-nineteen would come in. When John was a lad, sometimes, he, Joe, Herman, and often several other lads had climbed on the front of the baggage or mail car and had stolen a ride to the very town he was now in. What a thrill, crouched down in the gathering darkness on the platform as the train ran the ten miles, the car rocking from side to side! When it got a little dark, in the Fall or Spring, the fields beside the track were lighted up when the fireman opened his fire box to throw in coal. Once John saw a rabbit running along in the glare of light beside the track. He could have reached down and caught it with his hand. In the neighboring town the boys went into saloons and played pool and drank beer. They could depend upon catching a ride back home on the local freight that got to Caxton at about ten thirty. On one of the adventures John and Herman got drunk and Joe had to help them into an empty coal car and later get them out at Caxton. Herman got sick, and when they were getting off the freight at Caxton, he stumbled and came very near falling under the wheels of the moving train. John wasn’t as drunk as Herman. When the others weren’t looking, he had poured several of the glasses of beer into a spittoon. In Caxton he and Joe had to walk about with Herman for several hours and when John finally got home, his mother was still awake and was worried. He had to lie to her. “I drove out into the country with Herman, and a wheel broke. We had to walk home.” The reason Joe could carry his beer so well was because he was German. His father owned the town meat market and the family had beer on the table at home. No wonder it did not knock him out as it did Herman and John.

  There was a bench at the side of the railroad station, in the shade, and John sat there for a long time—two hours, three hours. Why hadn’t he brought a book? In fancy he composed a letter to his son and in it he spoke of the fields lying beside the road outside the town of Caxton, of his greeting old friends there, of things that had happened when he was a boy. He even spoke of his former sweetheart, of Lillian. If he now thought out just what he was going to say in the letter, he could write it in his room at the hotel over in Caxton in a few minutes without having to stop and think what he was going to say. You can’t always be too fussy about what you say to a young boy. Really, sometimes, you should take him into your confidence, into your life, make him a part of your life.

  It was six twenty when John drove into Caxton and went to the hotel, where he registered, and was shown to a room. On the streets as he drove into town he saw Billy Baker, who, when he was a young man, had a paralyzed leg that dragged along the sidewalk when he walked. Now he was getting old; his face seemed wrinkled and faded, like a dried lemon, and his clothes had spots down the front. People, even sick people, live a long time in small Ohio towns. It is surprising how they hang on.

  John had put his car, of a rather expensive make, into a garage beside the hotel. Formerly, in his day, the building had been used as a livery barn. There used to be pictures of famous trotting and pacing horses on the walls of the little office at the front. Old Dave Grey, who owned race horses of his own, ran the livery barn then, and John occasionally hired a rig there. He hired a rig and took Lillian for a ride into the country, along moonlit roads. By a lonely farmhouse a dog barked. Sometimes they drove along a little dirt road lined with elders and stopped the horse. How still everything was! What a queer feeling they had! They couldn’t talk. Sometimes they sat in silence thus, very near each other, for a long, long time. Once they got out of the buggy, having tied the horse to the fence, and walked in a newly cut hay field. The cut hay lay all about in little cocks. John wanted to lie on one of the haycocks with Lillian, but did not dare suggest it.

  At the hotel John ate his dinner in silence. There wasn’t even a traveling salesman in the dining-room, and presently the proprietor’s wife came and stood by his table to talk with him. The hotel had a good many tourists, but this just happened to be a quiet day. Dull days came that way in the hotel business. The woman’s husband was a traveling man and had bought the hotel to give his wife something to keep her interested while he was on the road. He was away from home so much! They had come to Caxton from Pittsburgh.

  After he had dined, John went up to his room, and presently the woman followed. The door leading into the hall had been left open, and she came and stood in the doorway. Really, she was rather handsome. She only wanted to be sure that everything was all right, that he had towels and soap and everything he needed.

  For a time she lingered by the door talking of the town.

  “It’s a good little town. General Hurst is buried here. You should drive out to the cemetery and see the statue.” He wondered who General Hurst was. In what war had he fought. Odd that he hadn’t remembered about him. The town had a piano factory, and there was a watch company from Cincinnati talking of putting up a plant. “They figure there is less chance of labor trouble in a small town like this.”

  The woman went reluctantly away. As she was going along the hallway she stopped once and looked back. There was something a little queer. They were both self-conscious. “I hope you’ll be comfortable,” she said. At forty a man did not come home to his own home town to start . . . A traveling man’s wife, eh? Well! Well!

  At seven forty-five John went out for a walk on Main Street and almost at once he met Tom Ballard, who at once recognized him, a fact that pleased Tom. He bragged about it. “Once I see a face, I never forget. Well! Well!” When John was twenty-two, Tom must have been about fifteen. His father was the leading doctor of the town. He took John in tow, walked back with him toward the hotel. He kept exclaiming: “I knew you at once. You haven’t changed much, really.”

  Tom was in his turn a doctor, and there was about him something . . . Right away John guessed what it was. They went up into John’s room, and John, having in his bag a bottle of whisky, poured Tom a drink, which he took somewhat too eagerly, John thought. There was talk. After Tom had taken the drink he sat on the edge of the bed, still holding the bottle John had passed to him. Herman was running a dray now. He had married Kit Small and had five kids. Joe was working for the International Harvester
Company. “I don’t know whether he’s in town now or not. He’s a trouble-shooter, a swell mechanic, a good fellow,” Tom said. He drank again.

  As for Lillian, mentioned with an air of being casual by John, he, John, knew of course that she had been married and divorced. There was some sort of trouble about another man. Her husband married again later, and now she lived with her mother, her father, the shoe merchant, having died. Tom spoke somewhat guardedly, as though protecting a friend.

  “I guess she’s all right now, going straight and all. Good thing she never had any kids. She’s a little nervous and queer; has lost her looks a good deal.”

  The two men went downstairs and, walking along Main Street, got into a car belonging to the doctor.

  “I’ll take you for a little ride,” Tom said; but as he was about to pull away from the curb where the car had been parked, he turned and smiled at his passenger. “We ought to celebrate a little, account of your coming back here,” he said. “What do you say to a quart?”

  John handed him a ten-dollar bill, and he disappeared into a nearby drug store. When he came back he laughed.

  “I used your name, all right. They didn’t recognize it. In the prescription I wrote out I said you had a general breakdown, that you needed to be built up. I recommended that you take a teaspoonful three times a day. Lord! my prescription book is getting almost empty.” The drug store belonged to a man named Will Bennett. “You remember him, maybe. He’s Ed Bennett’s son; married Carrie Wyatt.” The names were but dim things in John’s mind. “This man is going to get drunk. He is going to try to get me drunk, too,” he thought.

  When they had turned out of Main Street and into Walnut Street they stopped midway between two street lights and had another drink, John holding the bottle to his lips, but putting his tongue over the opening. He remembered the evenings with Joe and Herman when he had secretly poured his beer into a spittoon. He felt cold and lonely. Walnut Street was one along which he used to walk, coming home late at night from Lillian’s house. He remembered people who then lived along the street, and a list of names began running through his head. Often the names remained, but did not call up images of people. They were just names. He hoped the doctor would not turn the car into the street in which the Holdens had lived. Lillian had lived over in another part of town, in what was called “The Red House District.” Just why it had been called that John did not know.

  III

  They drove silently along, up a small hill, and came to the edge of town, going south. Stopping before a house that had evidently been built since John’s time, Tom sounded his horn.

  “Didn’t the fair grounds used to stand about here?” John asked. The doctor turned and nodded his head.

  “Yes, just here,” he said. He kept on sounding his horn, and a man and woman came out of the house and stood in the road beside the car.

  “Let’s get Maud and Alf and all go over to Lylse’s Point,” Tom said. John had indeed been taken into tow. For a time he wondered if he was to be introduced. “We got some hooch. Meet John Holden; used to live here years ago.” At the fair grounds, when John was a lad, Dave Grey, the livery man, used to work out his race horses in the early morning. Herman, who was a horse enthusiast, dreaming of some day becoming a horseman, came often to John’s house in the early morning and the two boys went off to the fair grounds without breakfast. Herman had got some sandwiches made of slices of bread and cold meat out of his mother’s pantry. They went ’cross-lots, climbing fences and eating the sandwiches. In a meadow they had to cross there was heavy dew on the grass, and meadow larks flew up before them. Herman had at least come somewhere near expressing in his life his youthful passion: he still lived about horses; he owned a dray. With a little inward qualm John wondered. Perhaps Herman ran a motortruck.

  The man and woman got into the car, the woman on the back seat with John, the husband in front with Tom, and they drove away to another house. John could not keep track of the streets they passed through. Occasionally he asked the woman, “What street are we in now?” They were joined by Maud and Alf, who also crowded into the back seat. Maud was a slender woman of twenty-eight or thirty, with yellow hair and blue eyes, and at once she seemed determined to make up to John. “I don’t take more than an inch of room,” she said, laughing and squeezing herself in between John and the first woman, whose name he could not later remember.

  He had rather liked Maud. When the car had been driven some eighteen miles along a gravel road, they came to Lylse’s farmhouse, which had been converted into a road-house, and got out. Maud had been silent most of the way, but she sat very close to John and as he felt cold and lonely, he was grateful for the warmth of her slender body. Occasionally she spoke to him in a half-whisper: “Ain’t the night swell! Gee! I like it out in the dark this way.”

  Lylse’s Point was at a bend of the Samson River, a small stream to which John as a lad had occasionally gone on fishing excursions with his father. Later he went out there several times with crowds of young fellows and their girls. They drove out then in Grey’s old bus, and the trip out and back took several hours. On the way home at night they had great fun singing at the top of their voices and waking the sleeping farmers along the road. Occasionally some of the party got out and walked for a way. It was a chance for a fellow to kiss his girl when the others could not see. By hurrying a little, they could easily enough catch up with the bus.

  A rather heavy-faced Italian named Francisco owned Lylse’s, and it had a dance hall and dining-room. Drinks could be had if you knew the ropes, and it was evident the doctor and his friends were old acquaintances. At once they declared John should not buy anything, the declaration, in fact, being made before he had offered. “You’re our guest now; don’t you forget that. When we come sometime to your town, then it will be all right,” Tom said. He laughed. “And that makes me think. I forgot your change,” he said, handing John a five-dollar bill. The whisky got at the drug-store had been consumed on the way out, all except John and Maud drinking heartily. “I don’t like the stuff. Do you, Mr. Holden?” Maud said and giggled. Twice during the trip out her fingers had crept over and touched lightly his fingers, and each time she had apologized. “Oh, do excuse me!” she said. John felt a little as he had felt earlier in the evening when the woman of the hotel had come to stand at the door of his room and had seemed reluctant about going away.

  After they got out of the car at Lylse’s, he felt uncomfortably old and queer. “What am I doing here with these people?” he kept asking himself. When they had got into the light, he stole a look at his watch. It was not yet nine o’clock. Several other cars, most of them, the doctor explained, from Yerington, stood before the door, and when they had taken several drinks of rather mild Italian red wine, all of the party except Maud and John went into the dance hall to dance. The doctor took John aside and whispered to him: “Lay off Maud,” he said. He explained hurriedly that Alf and Maud had been having a row and that for several days they had not spoken to each other, although they lived in the same house, ate at the same table, and slept in the same bed. “He thinks she gets too gay with men,” Tom explained. “You better look out a little.”

  The woman and man sat on a bench under a tree on the lawn before the house, and when the others had danced, they came out, bringing more drinks. Tom had got some more whisky. “It’s moon, but pretty good stuff,” he declared. In the clear sky overhead stars were shining, and when the others were dancing, John turned his head and saw across the road and between the trees that lined its banks the stars reflected in the waters of the Samson. A light from the house fell on Maud’s face, a strikingly lovely face in that light, but when looked at closely, rather petulant. “A good deal of the spoiled child in her,” John thought.

  She began asking him about life in the city of New York.

  “I was there once, but for only three days. It was when I went to school in the East. A girl I knew lived there. She married a lawyer named Trigan, or something like that.
You didn’t know him, I guess.”

  And now there was a hungry, dissatisfied look on her face.

  “God! I’d like to live in a place like that, not in this hole! There hadn’t no man better tempt me.” When she said that she giggled again. Once during the evening they walked across the dusty road and stood for a time by the river’s edge, but got back to the bench before the others finished their dance. Maud persistently refused to dance.

  At ten thirty, all of the others having got a little drunk, they drove back to town, Maud again sitting beside John. On the drive Alf went to sleep. Maud pressed her slender body against John’s, and after two or three futile moves to which he made no special response, she boldly put her hand into his. The second woman and her husband talked with Tom of people they had seen at Lylse’s. “Do you think there’s anything up between Fanny and Joe? No; I think she’s on the square.”

  They got to John’s hotel at eleven thirty, and, bidding them all good night, he went upstairs. Alf had awakened. When they were parting, he leaned out of the car and looked closely at John. “What did you say your name was?” he asked.

  John went up a dark stairway and sat on the bed in his room. Lillian had lost her looks. She had married, and her husband had divorced her. Joe was a trouble-shooter. He worked for the International Harvester Company, a swell mechanic. Herman was a drayman. He had five kids.

  Three men in a room next to John’s were playing poker. They laughed and talked, and their voices came clearly to John. “You think so, do you? Well, I’ll prove you’re wrong.” A mild quarrel began. As it was Summer, the windows of John’s room were open, and he went to one to stand, looking out. A moon had come up, and he could see down into an alleyway. Two men came out of a street and stood in the alleyway, whispering. After they left, two cats crept along a roof and began a love-making scene. The game in the next room broke up. John could hear voices in the hallway.